Long ago, in the mid and late-90s, the mobile device market was a bit different from today's. Palm led the PDA category, with monochrome devices that operated offline, until the Palm VII and its ultra-slow Internet service came out. The Palm VII was all the rage amongst early-adopters... I even bought the erstwhile publisher of Visual Studio Magazine's predecessor one and shipped it to him, because they were available in New York, but not in the Bay Area, where he was.
Then a Canadian company called Research In Motion came out with the Blackberry. It was also monochrome, and its form factor was that of an alpha pager. It was not a phone. But, with proper configuration, it could get your email over the air, in real-time, sometimes even before the message showed up in Outlook. And it had a wonderful QWERTY keyboard, that somehow made thumb-typing feasible. It could also sync your calendar and contacts over a USB cable, just like the Palm PDAs. I had one and it was pretty cool. Click here for a picture of that model.
To counter Palm, Microsoft came out with their PocketPC platform, appearing first on Compaq's iPaq device. A color screen, a workable on-screen keyboard (versus Palm's "Graffiti" stylus gesture input) and a Windows-derived software platform made it a compelling product. And with WiFi options, the thing count be nicely Internet connected, at reasonable speeds.
When Pocket PC morphed into "PocketPC, Phone Edition," the PDA platform became the first version of Windows Mobile, the one people now love to hate. Some said WinMo devices were just little PCs that could make phone calls, but when Phone Edition came out, that was literally true.
By this time BlackBerry units had also grown into phones, and Redmond's competitive sights slowly shifted away from Palm in Silicon Valley up north to RIM in Canada. Microsoft knew that RIM had two things they were missing: push email and physical keyboards. But those two things could be crafted by Microsoft and its OEMs, respectively, and given that a majority of RIM devices were in any case syncing against Microsoft's own Exchange Server, that meant Microsoft could provide the entire solution.
Microsoft was able to build its own Over-The-Air (OTA) sync technology, to which it applied its usual nomenclature savvy, christening it Exchange Sync. They then partnered with various handset OEMs, ironically starting with Palm and its 700w unit, to produce WinMo phones that featured the technology. Other phones followed, including the Q from Motorola and various units from HTC and Samsung.
This was (and is) a really competitive offering, but Redmond, with its business model, became its own worst enemy. The first problem was the then-current versions of Exchange and Windows Mobile did not ship with support for Exchange Sync. Exchange admins could install it though, without too much hassle. On the handset side, certain OEMs shipped their first units without the Exchange Sync client, promising an in-store flash ROM update to add it later on. Between the server and client, you had to be really determined to get Exchange Sync to work, and that was a pity.
Eventually, the releases of Exchange 2007 and WinMo 6 came, and both had Exchange Sync support built in, making provisioning much simpler and, finally, delivering a push email platform that avoided the expense of BlackBerry's Enterprise Server (BES) product. Sync fidelity was really good too, eventually allowing users not just to accept appointments, but to check for conflicts before doing so. Microsoft's ducks were finally in a proverbial row. And Redmond was ready to beat RIM and own the phone space.
And then, as if from nowhere, the iPhone came out. The holy grail for mobility shifted from keyboard and OTA push/sync to UI elegance. The first iPhone wasn't much for push email, but the second one was. In an ironic twist of fate, Apple added its own (licensed) support for Exchange Sync and, while not as good as WinMo's implementation (even now), it was good enough for many. Add to that the innovation of the AppStore, and Microsoft's ducks moved out of row formation and went every which way. Then Android came out and made the competition even worse; Google too has licensed Exchange Sync in order to make its mobile platform business-friendly.
Exchange Sync was important, and it still is. It remains the only communication technology that provides a mainstream alternative to BlackBerry (solutions like those from Good provide alternatives too, but they're just not mainstream). Apple and Android have Exchange Sync (and GMail even implements it on the server), but their implementations are less complete than Microsoft's. That can become a vulnerability if players like RIM and Microsoft can achieve something like parity on the touch-screen and user interface side.
RIM has tried to do this with BlackBerry OS 6. Reviews are mixed, and the company may be headed to a slow decline. With Windows Phone 7, Microsoft is also trying to keep the sync fidelity and pair it with a great consumer-acceptable UI experience.
RIM tried to revamp their OS. Microsoft decided to build a completely new one. RIM's approach seems like it might not have worked, and I actually think Microsoft's looks pretty good. After spending some more time with a WP7 phone today, I believe that even more.
And because of all this, although Microsoft is not marketing WP7 to the RIM customer demographic, I think that demographic is where it's going to get significant market share. RIM's customers are more churn-prone right now than are Apple's or Google's. And they need the quality Exchange Sync experience that only Microsoft seems willing to implement. They want fun apps, and they want to spend more of their phone time using them. But they need what they do with their phones today to keep working. They may not talk about it, or lust after it, but they need it. If it were gone, they'd be outraged. And that means, if they jump ship from RIM, they're going to need WP7.
This may sound boring, or anti-climactic. It may be tempting to dismiss it as "one dying dinosaur benefitting from another that is dying more quickly." But I think that misses the key point. Microsoft has focused on messaging for a long time. Exchange Sync made for a really good client play and the licensing of Exchange Sync to Apple and Google has helped Exchange become an even more entrenched standard for corporate email and groupware. Now a new Microsoft mobile device, with consumer credibility, may show how important the message/sync focus was. If this works, then Microsoft can focus on Android and iOS afterwards. And we'll see if the RIM-ex-pat momentum helps.
Posted by Andrew J. Brust on 08/31/2010 at 7:16 AM0 comments
This past Wednesday, Beta 1 of Visual Studio LightSwitch (VSLS) was be made available to MSDN Subscribers. On Monday, it will be made available to the general public, at
http://www.msdn.com/lightswitch. Even in advance of Monday, that site is already making useful content available. Specifically, a Channel 9 video called "
Visual Studio LightSwitch - Beyond The Basics" is well worth the viewing time. In it, Beth Massi (Program Manager on the Visual Studio Community Team) interviews Joe Binder (a Program Manager on the LightSwitch team) and the conversation is a revealing one.
The two start off with what is emerging as the standard demo of VSLS: creation of a simple SQL Server database, with hierarchical relationships between tables, and some attractive screens with which to view, enter and maintain the data. VSLS is a new product, and Massi and Binder have to start with this demo.
But they then go past that simple scenario and bear out, in a practical demo, what Redmond folks like Dave Mendlen and Jason Zander have been saying for the last three weeks: enterprise developers can extend the standard functionality delivered by VSLS. As it turns out, Mendlen and Zander haven't just been nursing their talking points... if anything, they've been understating VSLS' virtues.
Joe Binder showed how VSLS extensibility works. He did so in a matter of fact way: he simply built a Silverlight control, and then used it in his LightSwitch app. He then built a RIA Service, plugged it into the VSLS project, and almost instantly built a screen on top of it. The Silverlight control was built in a standard Silverlight project, and the RIA service was built in its own standard project type as well. The only "twist' was that the Silverlight code could reference objects in the VSLS project and bind to one of its collections automatically.
What we learn from this video is that (1) LightSwitch projects can be extended in a serious way; (2) instead of building a bunch of new interfaces and special objects, VSLS extensibility is done with standard .NET technologies; and (3) that synergy between a new framework and standard, existing technologies is additively augmented with (and not replaced by) VSLS APIs. VSLS pros can do what they do while teaming with .NET enterprise devs doing what they do. That's low on disruption and high on added value. And beyond that, each one can learn a bit more about the other's discipline and make the result richer still.
I think this is how software should work. I think developers should be productive quickly and then have the opportunity to learn more and do even better. In other words, the skill levels should be Good and Better, rather than Bad and Good. LightSwitch makes that possible. Which means, despite fears out there which are utterly to the contrary, LightSwitch helps .NET, and it helps .NET developers.
The team behind LightSwitch derives from the teams that built many of the Visual Studio data tools and data binding technologies, as well as from Visual Basic itself. They're wonderfully pragmatic, if you ask me, and they fought hard to get this product out there. Lots of people, including folks at Microsoft itself, were skeptical of this product, and these guys got it done.
Version 1 won't be perfect. Version 1 is never perfect. If things go well, Version 1 proves a point, and does it well enough for people to make a switch (as it were) and use the product in their work. I hope things go well. LightSwitch needs to succeed and so do the people who need it.
Posted by Andrew J. Brust on 08/23/2010 at 6:51 AM5 comments
In this blog and in
my column, I've written a lot lately about new technologies from Microsoft that seek to make software development easier. Technologies like ASP.NET Web Pages,
Razor and WebMatrix,
Access Web Databases and
Visual Studio LightSwitch. Each of these technologies, I believe, is bringing much needed accessibility to programming on the Microsoft platform.
I've also written about Windows Phone 7 which, despite extreme skepticism in the press and analyst communities, has the potential to be an excellent SmartPhone platform. And I've explored rather deeply HTML5, a technology that I believe poses an existential threat to Windows and to Microsoft itself, if Redmond's inertia of the last several years persists.
As I consider all of these technologies, something emerges that, with hindsight, is frightfully obvious: they need to coalesce, unify and harmonize. LightSwitch, which produces Silverlight forms-over-data applications, needs to target Windows Phone 7. Access Web Databases, which deploy as forms-over-data SharePoint applications, should perhaps have some conformity with LightSwitch, and vice-versa.
LightSwitch targets SQL Server Express by default. WebMatrix targets SQL Server Compact. Access Web databases target SharePoint lists and SQL Server Reporting Services. In other words, each of these exciting new tools targets SQL Server in some way (SharePoint lists are stored in SQL Server tables), but none of them targets the same edition of the product. I guess that's OK for the first versions of each of these tools, but I hope these anomalies are addressed in v2 releases. Microsoft likes to talk about impedance mismatches in data access technologies, and I think they've created a massive one of their own.
What about HTML5? Its threat could be blunted if Microsoft confronted it head-on. The version of Internet Explorer on Windows Phone 7 should be HTML5-compatible. LightSwitch v2 should target HTML5 as an alternate rendering target, which would enable LightSwitch apps to run on devices other than those running Microsoft operating systems, or the Mac OS (on Intel-based Macs). I wouldn't mind seeing SharePoint get more HTML5 savvy itself. It would enhance SharePoint's richness, in every single browser, including those that run on mobile devices.
To me, the biggest downside of HTML5 is the relative dearth of good developer tools for it, and the JavaScript heaviness it can bring about. But I would think that the HTML helpers in Razor and ASP.NET Server Pages could be a huge help there. Is Microsoft working on HTML5 Razor helpers now? If not, why not? And WebMatrix aside, it should add good IDE tooling for HTML5 in the full Visual Studio product.
Microsoft's got a lot of good answers to a great number of important software development questions. Now it just needs to make those answers coordinated and consistent. If it can really integrate these tools, then it should. Divided, some or all of these tools will fall. United, they might stand. They could even soar.
Posted by Andrew J. Brust on 08/13/2010 at 6:08 AM2 comments
At
VSLive today, I had the pleasure of introducing Microsoft Corporate VP Jason Zander. And he had the pleasure of
introducing Visual Studio LightSwitch. Pleasure is a theme here, because the product, to me at least, looks great.
LightSwitch is a .NET based environment, hosted in Visual Studio, that allows developers to build business apps. Quickly. It harkens back, with pride, to tools of old, like VB6 and FoxPro, that made data, and data maintenance UIs, first class citizens. These tools also treated line-of-business developers as VIPs, not as the great unwashed.
LightSwitch builds Silverlight applications. They can run locally (in or out of the browser) and they can also run on Windows Azure. They can work with any database, but the development environment makes it very easy to create SQL Server databases, and can then deploy them to SQL Azure. The stock UIs look very Microsoft Office-like, but third parties can build alternative skins/themes that plug right into the environment. Infragistics already has a prototype. Microsoft showed it on stage today. And it did look really nice.
Data validations are built in. Search is built in. Business data types (rather than simple database or .NET data types) are built in. LightSwitch takes away the burden of creating a bunch of plumbing for corporate apps. Plumbing that you either have to write every time, or else use some framework that, by definition, won’t be very standard.
Tools in the 1990s did this too. Then the 2000s came and many of those tools largely went away. Now one has come back, and it targets the modern Microsoft stack, including Silverlight and Azure and the Entity Framework and WCF RIA Services. With considerably less working in the weeds to use these technologies than has been required until now. And, yes, LightSwitch lets you write .NET code when you need to.
I watched the tweets fly by during the keynote. Many expressed curiosity and excitement. Others expressed dismay. Dismay that “lesser” developers will have access to the modern stack. Dismay that they’ll build the apps quickly. And dismay that Microsoft wants to enable them. The dismay was often uttered under the cover of concern for stability, scalability and maintainability.
To the dismayed, I must say: get over it, and stop worrying. \There’s room for productivity developers. There’s room for enterprise developers. They don’t have to be at odds. This is not a zero sum game.
We need productivity programmers to be accommodated on the Microsoft stack. If they are not, they will go to other stacks. In fact, they already have. We have to try and get them back. They create opportunities for enterprise devs, and they create opportunities for their customers. I hope LightSwitch appeals to them. I hope it brings them back to the Microsoft ecosystem. I don’t know if it will, but even if it doesn’t, that doesn’t make it a bad idea. Celebrating difficulty and demonizing productive ease? To me, that’s the bad idea.
Posted by Andrew J. Brust on 08/03/2010 at 11:35 AM9 comments
On Thursday, a scathingly bad review of Windows Phone 7 (WP7)
was published by InfoWorld. I had considered writing a post to refute some of its points, but Paul Thurrott did just that, and did it masterfully. There's little value that I can add to his post,
other than to link it and suggest that you read it.
Meanwhile, Sunday and Monday, much more fair reviews were posted at CNET, ZDNet, Gizmodo, Engadget and MobileCrunch. All of these reviews were based on actual hands-on experience with a prototype Samsung device called "Taylor;" the InfoWorld post was based on the author's apparently unenjoyable experience at a product demo.
I'll let you read the reviews on your own and won't provide a CliffsNotes style redux of them here. What I will do though, is try and present some of the consensus findings, and how I think those findings bode for the success of the WP7 platform. Here goes:
- 1. The touch screen is accurate and fast. This is huge...my biggest concern about WP7 was that in the early demos, the combination of the hardware and software seemingly produced a substandard touch experience. If you look carefully at those early demos, you will see flicks and swipes that are either ignored, or which produce responses on an unacceptably delayed basis. What I said then is that Microsoft and its OEMs needed to fix this and make it flawless, otherwise it would be a deal-breaker. Seems like this gap has been closed, at least on the Samsung hardware that the reviewers used in their evaluations.
- 2. The keyboard is accurate and fast too. A couple of the reviewers were emphatic in their enthusiasm over the keyboard. This is a big deal too, especially as a high-value candidate WP7 customer group is current BlackBerry customers, and they are used to physical keyboards. This really looks like an area where Microsoft can tie with Apple and win against Android.
- 3. The highly text-oriented Metro interface is very appealing to certain users, and others find it disorienting. This is about what I expected, and even a bit better for Microsoft than I might have predicted. Microsoft decided -- wisely, in my opinion -- to craft a smartphone user interface that was not derivative of the iPhone's or Android's. I applaud this, but the danger in that is that Microsoft is breaking with a standard, and many people will see that effort as folly, and its work product as unusable. The outcome seems to be that InfoWorld hates it, a couple of the other reviewers were uncomfortable with it, and the remainder were pretty positive. Even CNET (one of the doubters) sees the validity in doing something different. Together, these reviews provide a genuine endorsement of Microsoft's UI strategy gamble, even if not a vote specifically for Metro, in all cases.
- 4. Exchange integration and email in general seem very well implemented. Once again, this will appeal to the BlackBerry crowd. Office integration seems more optimized for viewing documents than for editing them. That’s a disappointment, to be sure. But it’s no worse than the other platforms.
- 5. The camera is really good, highly accessible, and fast. This could be an unexpectedly important advantage for WP7. Megapixels aside, the state of the art in mobile phone cameras still sucks wind. If Microsoft breaks this precedent and people hear about it, then it could be a nice driver of new handset sales for the platform.
- 6. The Web browser, though not best in class, seems very good. This will surprise people who assume that Microsoft's lack of a WebKit-based browser means WP7 can't be functional for Web browsing. Opinions seem mixed regarding lack of HTML5 support. My take: this will need to come fairly quickly, but is likely not to be crucial at launch. My Motorola Droid has a WebKit browser with decent HTML5 support. But I think the only place I've put it to work was on the HTML5 test and demo sites I hit with it, out of curiosity.
- 7. Everyone thinks the lack of cut and paste is unfathomably sucky. And they're right; it is. I think there's a very high probability that this capability will come in an over-the-air OS update within months of launch, and maybe sooner. In fact, I think there's a 30% chance that Microsoft will surprise us and have cut and paste ready for launch itself. Most reviewers bemoan the lack of multitasking too. I think this is less important – I think most iPad owners would agree, or at least they will up until the iOS4 release for their devices. That’s sort of my point: you can live without multi-tasking, until you have it, and then it’s a non-issue.
- 8. Facebook integration is elegant and simple. It "lights up" exciting and impressive functionality on the phone. But it's not configurable enough and is unwieldy for people with a large number of Facebook friends. Good enough for v1.0, but probably not for v1.1, let alone v2.0.
- 9. Twitter integration, other than through Windows Live, is conspicuously absent. Either Microsoft needs to add this, or a third party Twitter app, hopefully from Seesmic, needs to be available immediately and its integration with WP7's hubs and other features must be exemplary. If neither a native nor good 3rd-party app is available at launch or very soon thereafter, it could make WP7 a laughing stock. That could happen anyway, of course, but the lack of Twitter integration could be a laughter accelerant.
- 10. UI inconsistencies in WP7 exist, especially around search and hidden "long taps" and could prove fatal. Or not. On the one hand, WP7 needs to be perfect, and these apparent issues make it fail the perfection test. That, in turn, could prevent WP7 from getting over the incumbency lock that Apple and Android have on the market. On the other hand, neither of those platforms is perfect either, and they certainly were not perfect at launch. So maybe people will cut WP7 some slack, given the high points already discussed here.
- 11. Overall, WP7 will make Microsoft a contender in the mobile arena again. How long it can maintain that contention, and whether it can convert it to a leadership position is anyone's guess. But it is trying, it is getting traction, and it has the will to fight. Given the lowered expectations just about everyone has of Microsoft in this market, the mere fighting spirit and encouraging interim achievements it has delivered may catch people's attention. Heck, maybe that's why the crash and burn of Kin was so public and extreme.
WP7's introduction and market positioning will be seminal for Microsoft, to the upside, or to the downside. A significant success could restore morale amongst Microsoft's employees, partners and customers. If it merely establishes a toehold, that could be very positive too -- just look at Bing for evidence of this. But if WP7 flops, it could cause irreparable damage to a company that is already diminished in the mobile and consumer space, a space which is becoming ever more influential on the enterprise arena that is Microsoft’s bread and butter.
A WP7 flop could come even if Microsoft does everything right with the product. Many people have true disdain for Microsoft, and at least some of these people need to be won over. That's hard when the hatred runs so deep and the loyalty to other players seems to impenetrable.
To win this one, Microsoft needs to do what it did to make Word overcome WordPerfect, Excel beat Lotus 1-2-3, Exchange overcome Notes, and Live Messenger overcome AIM, all combined with the chutzpah, naïveté and finesse used to launch Bing and make everyone forget about Live Search. Given all but the Bing victory occurred long ago, when Microsoft was much more on its game, this victory is nearly impossible. But if you bet on Microsoft, you'll certainly get good odds.
You might get a really good phone too. And isn’t that the authentic goal?
Posted by Andrew J. Brust on 07/20/2010 at 9:21 AM3 comments
This week, Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President at Microsoft's Developer Division, announced,
via blog post, the early Beta release of a new tool called WebMatrix. WebMatrix is a free developer tool that enables Web development geared toward what I might call Markup-and-Script developers (more on that in a minute). And although WebMatrix draws upon technologies already, or soon to be, present in the fuller ASP.NET Web development platform and the Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE), it is a radical departure from what those technologies have evolved into. Some review of Microsoft developer tool history might bring this into perspective.
Simple Beginnings
In the early and mid 90's, Microsoft's developer tools were pretty simple and straightforward. For Windows development, Microsoft had its Visual Basic (VB) product, and for Web development, it had something called Visual InterDev. For hardcore developers there was Visual C++, and for adherents to the acquired FoxPro product (now called Visual FoxPro, of course) there was that too.
The four products were sold together as a single entity called Visual Studio, but that name was really a bundle and umbrella brand for the four constituent products. Most Visual Studio customers used VB and InterDev for their work. VB featured an easy drag-and-drop design environment for building Windows desktop applications: drop controls on the form, set some properties, add a little code, and you could have a functional application. Visual InterDev provided an IDE for developing Active Server Pages (ASP) applications, which were simple text files consisting of HTML and Visual Basic code (actually a scripting version of VB, called VBScript). The VBScript was embedded within the HTML markup within <% and %> tokens so that the ASP engine on the Web server would know to parse it and send it to the Active Scripting engine. The files ended in an .asp extension so that the ASP engine would be invoked in the first place.
None of this was especially difficult, and yet it was impressively powerful. With VB, and ASP/Visual InterDev, Microsoft provided a way for clever, logical thinkers to be productive programmers in a short amount of time, and to use the same programming language expertise for both desktop and Web applications.
It was the best of times; it was the worst of times. Microsoft made programmers productive, but the low barrier to entry meant that lots of VB and ASP applications were written by bad programmers, and it gave the platform a bad name. Meanwhile, Java and its Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) flavor were eating VB and ASP for breakfast. J2EE was more complex and fragmented, but also more robust, scalable and, to be honest, more appealing to a higher caliber of developer.
Redmond's Revenge
Microsoft's response was to create the .NET Framework. Version 7 of Visual Studio was the first version of Visual Studio .NET. It provided a single IDE for desktop development and Web development, which could be done in a new version of VB (called VB .NET), or in a new langauge called C#, which bore an uncanny resemblance to Java. C++ could be used inside this IDE as well, and so could Microsoft's own licensed version of Java, called J#.
This version of Visual Studio and its Web technology, now called ASP.NET, extended the forms metaphor to Web development, such that the old "VB" and "ASP" were now called WinForms and WebForms, and they worked in a very similar manner. A (surprisingly) little known fact is that ASP.NET applications could still be developed using the old <%... %> syntax in the markup, without the need for forms and controls, but there was no encouragement from anyone to write ASP.NET code as if it were ASP.
The new IDE was more complex than any of the old ones, but in unifying them, it added simplicity too. A universal forms metaphor and a unified IDE, with the added rigor of the .NET Framework, and fully object-oriented programming made .NET very competitive with J2EE. Also, the programming was just enough harder to filter out many of the less capable developers who were on the Microsoft platform before. Microsoft made a big bet, and it won.
The Plot Thickens... And So Does the Platform
But Microsoft lost too. In political terms, it abandoned its base. And I think it did so based on a notion of false choice: it thought it had to cater to enterprise developers or productivity programmers, but that it couldn't do both.
And then it got worse: after the 2005 edition of Visual Studio and version 2.0 of the .NET Framework came out, Microsoft added a trio of technologies: the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). Originally these three technologies were planned to be part of what became Windows Vista, and were to be known collectively as WinFX. When they shipped, however, Microsoft decided to dissociate them from Vista and allow them to run on XP as well. Since they were really extensions to .NET, Microsoft rebranded the collection as .NET 3.0.
And this is where things started to get really complex. WCF and WF were not, and are not, for the faint of heart. WPF introduced a completely new way to create desktop applications. And while it added a slew of new capabilities, its designer for Visual Studio removed most of the productivity from its WinForms counterpart. These technologies have since been updated and have been joined by Silverlight (a relative of WPF, remade for Rich Internet Application use), ASP.NET MVC (which does away with the WebForms metaphor, but does not return us to the single-file comingled code + markup model), Language Integrated Query (LINQ), the Entity Framework (a data access model which sits atop, but effectively replaces, the native data access core, known as ADO.NET) and an array of application lifecycle management features within the Visual Studio IDE itself.
This is neat stuff. This ups the challenge to Java. It accommodates development of very large applications, built by big teams, distributed across the world. All of that is good. Much of it is crucial and necessary. But none of it helps that original constituency of developers who want a highly productive environment in which they can build entire applications (albeit smaller ones), quickly, easily, and largely by themselves. And those folks have been willing to be neglected for only so long.
Voting with Feet
Many of those productivity programmers have left the Microsoft platform, and many newer, younger programmers who also fit that profile, have steered clear of .NET and Microsoft completely, for this and a variety of other reasons. A lot of them have moved to languages like PHP.
If you look at PHP, you'll see it bears a strong resemblance to the old ASP: code comingled with markup, contained in blocks offset with <?php and ?>, inside files with a .php extension. There's no huge framework, nothing really like WCF and WF, and most PHP developers use very light tools for editing their code -- thick IDEs exist, but aren't so much the norm. PHP has a huge and enthusiastic community around it too. And while it may not be the right environment for those huge enterprise apps, it's good enough: Yahoo and Facebook run it, in fact.
So we're left with a situation where Microsoft is losing in market share, passion and enthusiasm to a development environment that works quite similarly to something Microsoft had 15 years ago. Yes, there are important differences: PHP runs on Linux as well as Windows. PHP is open source. Its syntax looks much more like C or JavaScript than it does Visual Basic. But the fact remains it has a simplicity and short path to productivity that intrigues developers and empowers them, and that's exactly what Microsoft knowingly and willfully jettisoned
Microsoft could always promote the fact that code + markup still works with ASP.NET. You can still use <%... %> syntax... and store everything in single files with an .aspx extension that you can then just push up to a Web server. You can edit these files pretty easily in Visual Studio. If you have the discipline to ignore all the other stuff in ASP.NET and the .NET Framework and all those menu options and toolbars and dockable windows in Visual Studio, you'll be fine. But advising abstinence and calm is no way to win over an entire population of developers that wants to spread out in territory that is friendly and navigable to them
Back to Basics
So instead of providing guidance around using a subset of ASP.NET Web Forms and a subset of Visual Studio, or just bringing back the old tools, Microsoft has done something far better. Through the introduction of a technology code-named Razor and its use in a new code + markup environment called ASP.NET Web Pages (not Forms) and provision of the new, highly streamlined WebMatrix IDE, Microsoft is beckoning the productivity programmers back, in a credible way, without condescension.
Now instead of starting your code with <%, you can use a simple @ sign for embedded expressions (and you don't need to end the expression with anything!) or use @{ and } for full-on code blocks. You put everything into files with a .cshtml extension (you can use .vbhtml too, with the inline code in VB.NET but the Razor code block syntax differs slightly). Razor also provides so-called HTML Helpers that make short work out of complex tasks. Want a scrolling window with tweets from me? Just embed this code in a page:
@Twitter.Profile("andrewbrust")
There's another helper just like that for Facebook, and a collection of others for creating data-driven user interfaces, sharing links on social networking sites and performing Web Analytics tasks.
WebMatrix also comes with a workstation-hostable version of Microsoft's Web server (Internet Information Server, or IIS) called IIS Developer Express. And it comes with a small, file-based database engine called SQL Server Compact, which is entering its 4th version, but only its first version optimized for ASP.NET. SQL Server Compact databases, and SQL Server Compact itself, can be easily deployed to any Windows Web server over any file copying protocol, including FTP. And WebMatrix can do that for you, with just a couple of clicks. It can even help you find a hoster and provision an account. There's also built-in starter features for creating and editing data, and for performing SEO analysis on your pages.
Web Matrix isn't exclusive to ASP.NET and SQL Server by the way. It also lets you edit and create applications using PHP and MySQL! That's a HUGE step for Microsoft, especially with regard to the database.
Gimmick, Experiment or New Leaf?
WebMatrix isn't perfect, certainly. And it's streamlining sometimes borders on plain old bare-bones. There's no IntelliSense (pop-up syntax completion), no rendered view of your Web Pages (you have to run the pages in a browser for that) and not much documentation that I can find, either on the tool itself or on Razor and the HTML helpers it includes.
Also, this is not the first product Microsoft has had called WebMatrix. An earlier product with the same name, back in the early days of .NET, which provided a simplified IDE for creating ASP.NET WebForms, was put on offer, also for free. That product gave rise to the Visual Studio "Express" Editions... but the original Web Matrix project died.
Will its successor suffer a similar fate? Is this just a freebie tool that Microsoft will obsess on for a while and then let languish? Is it just a cynical attempt at converting PHP developers over to the full-blown ASP.NET stack? It's hard to say, and Microsoft needs to make a real commitment to this WebMatrix if it wants developers to invest in it.
But it's a great start, and it's the first thing I have seen in a while from Microsoft that makes programming powerful and fun at the same time. I hope it's a precedent, and not mere anomaly.
Posted by Andrew J. Brust on 07/12/2010 at 7:21 AM7 comments
On Wednesday, Microsoft announced that their short-lived social networking-oriented phone, Kin, was being discontinued. I’m glad. In a post I wrote over a month ago, I implored Steve Ballmer to kill the product. I didn’t just do that because Kin 1 and 2 received terrible reviews; I had other reasons to distrust this product’s efficacy.
The Kin team has been led by Roz Ho, whose title has been Corporate Vice President, Premium Mobile Experiences. During the development cycle for Kin, a.k.a. Project "Pink," there was some reporting that Ms. Ho led the team badly. The team was the successor to the crew at Danger, the company that built the T-Mobile Sidekick, and which Microsoft acquired in 2008. The negative reporting on Ho included the suggestion that her leadership made for morale so low that most of the original Danger team quit their jobs.
Cnet’s Ina Fried broke the Kin killed story Wednesday. In her piece we learned that the Kin team would be merged into the Windows Phone 7 group and that:
"Roz Ho, the Microsoft executive who lead the unit that developed the Kin will oversee the transition of the team and then move to an as-yet-determined role at the company, according to a source."
None of this is surprising. Given the product’s history, it was clear to me that Microsoft would have to kill Kin. But Windows Phone 7, which still looks promising, got under development quite a while back. When that team was organized, the legacy Windows Mobile team was disbanded. Why didn’t Roz Ho get the heave ho, too? (Ahem!) With WP7 on track and looking good, why on earth did Microsoft bring Kin to market? Here are my top 10 reasons, some more serious than others (drum roll, please, Paul):
10. Taking down a Corporate VP wasn’t politically feasible. Kin had to be brought to market, and had to fail, in order to topple Ho from her position and consolidate power in the WP7 team.
9. The investment in Kin, both in terms of the Danger acquisition and subsequent development was really big. Ballmer figured he had to give it the old college try…and then bail quickly if indeed the phones were duds.
8. Verizon wanted their own Sidekick-like device (not wanting to cede that part of the market to T-Mobile) and implored Microsoft to persevere with Kin’s development.
7. Microsoft knew the Kin would fail, but they wanted to use it as a trial balloon for Kin Studio, the companion cloud service that replicates most data and content stored on the phone. This would help Microsoft determine if the Studio concept should be used with Windows Phone 7 when it launches later this year.
6. When the Kin team finished its work, it was nearing the end of Microsoft’s July 1 fiscal year. They had leftover TV ad budget and they had to spend it on something.
5. Microsoft got the kin.com three-letter domain name and they couldn’t let it go to waste.
4. Microsoft really didn’t want Sharp to be a Windows Phone OEM. They didn’t have the heart to tell them though. This was their passive-aggressive way of getting Sharp to back off.
3. Microsoft was angry at Engadget for their negative review of Kin. So they killed it and gave Gizmodo the scoop.
2. The announcement yesterday was an elaborate April Fool’s joke. But its ship date was delayed until the end of the quarter. and…
1. The whole thing was a dare to Verizon from Apple. Jobs said if they carried the Kin in earnest for 2 months, he’d give them the iPhone in January. And Verizon really wanted the iPhone.
I once worked for a guy who told me sarcasm was the lowest form of wit. So be it. I’m done now.
Posted by Andrew J. Brust on 07/02/2010 at 8:29 AM1 comments
This past Monday, June 21st, the New York City Council Committee on Technology in Government held a hearing on its proposed legislation, known as
Introduction 029-2010, that would require all City agencies to publish their data online, in "raw" form. The data would be available to private citizens who wished to analyze it, hobbyist developers who wished to work with it, and commercial entities looking to utilize it internally or create products that use and add value to it.
Such initiatives have already taken root in other jurisdictions, including the U.S. Federal Government. Its open data portal, at www.data.gov, serves as a very good example to state and local governments that wish to implement the same sort of good government transparency through technology.
At first blush, the legislation would appear difficult for anyone to oppose. Donn Morrill, chairman of the New York Technology Council (NYTECH) , eloquently expressed this point of view in his testimony at the hearing:
"This should not be a contentious bill. None of you will lose a vote. None of you will lose an endorsement. None of you will lose a dollar in financing by supporting this bill. What you will gain is recognition from the community that your affirmative vote will open doors for enterprising companies to develop new and exciting ways to experience New York City."
In my opinion, Morrill’s quite right; enactment of the legislation should be a "no brainer." The fact remains, however, that there has been resistance to it. A year ago I was present, and testified, at another City Council hearing on last year’s version of the same legislation. At that meeting representatives from the Mayor’s Office, in their own testimony, discussed the then recently announced NYC Big Apps competition and the data feeds that were published to facilitate it. They proclaimed the Mayor’s "customer-centric" position that only select data should be published, because only select data would be of interest to City residents.
The Mayor’s thinking, at the time, was that investment of City resources in producing feeds of all non-privacy-protected City data would be impractical, given that only a relatively small subset of it would be used. Committee Chairperson Gale Brewer disagreed, explaining that determining which data was valuable prior to its publication was virtually impossible. Andrew Hoppin, the New York State Senate’s CIO (follow him on Twitter at @ahoppin) made a similar point in his testimony this week, appealing to the City to "Resist the temptation to adjudicate what [data] is of value and what is not of value."
I agree, and said so in my own testimony at this week’s hearing. I think the whole point of publishing government data is that seemingly mundane data can form the raw material of extremely useful information, be it related to health, economics, commerce or even potholes.
The good news is that at this year’s hearing, the Administration’s attitude seems to have changed. The recently appointed Commissioner of the City’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT), Carole Post, essentially the City’s CIO, expressed her agreement in principle with the legislation’s aim of making all agency data available. Where Post took exception to the legislation is in the cost and effort feasibility of making such a wide ranging set of data available in a relatively short timeframe. This is a tough call. As I said in one of my live tweets during the hearing, the "ask" of DoITT is big and scary. But if they express that, it looks like they're stonewalling. For what it’s worth, I think Commissioner Post is not stonewalling. I think she’s dedicated to this effort, and wants to avoid over promising and under-delivering.
Getting the data out can be difficult, both for reasons of bureaucracy and technology. If the data to be published is managed by a legacy mainframe application, getting it out there in digestible XML or CSV form may not be so easy. And even if it is, publishing static data is only the first step. Eventually the data should have an API (application programming interface) around it so that developers can query it interactively and, in some cases, create/submit data as well. Think about it: we don’t just want to get a of list crimes that took place. We want to be able to query that list by neighborhood or police precinct, median income level of the area, severity of the crime, and determine also if the rate of crime in that narrowed category is increasing or decreasing. Insurance companies, real estate agents, and makers of security products may like to know likewise. And the City itself should want to know too, so resources in the next fiscal year can be allocated appropriately.
Beyond such analytical inquiries, there should also be an API for reporting crimes (which would require creation of data, not consumption of it) too. This could allow citizens to report crime, in real time, from their mobile phones, with the tap of a button in an app. The GPS in the phone could alert authorities to the precise location of the incident, and the phone's camera could even submit a photo. Maybe such technology could address the "bystander effect" allegedly exhibited in the infamous Kitty Genovese stabbing case of the 1960s. Imagine if New York City government used technology to obsolesce a phenomenon made prominent in its own jurisdiction. Removing that blemish would be a proud moment.
I mentioned in my testimony that Microsoft's Open Government Data Initiative (OGDI) should be considered by the City as one platform for serving the City’s Open Data. OGDI is based on the Open Data Protocol (OData - itself based on numerous open Web standards) and Microsoft’s cloud platform, Windows Azure. OGDI is itself an Open Source starter kit that provides not just for the publication of data, but of a programming API and the ability both to read and write data.
Regardless of the protocol used, Open Data for this nation’s largest city is immensely important and it's very heartening to see the Council and the Administration in relative agreement on this point. Should the legislation be enacted, and implemented, the opportunities for entrepreneurs and the potential benefit to the public, to business and to the City itself will likely be big, exciting, and inspiration for municipalities across the world.
Posted by Andrew J. Brust on 06/24/2010 at 1:06 PM1 comments
Three days ago I participated in a special outreach campaign. Specifically, I was part of an effort to mentor various members of the U.S, Congress (in both the House and Senate) in issues concerning technology companies. I took part in a full day of meetings on Capitol Hill, organized by the Association for Competitive Technology (ACT), an organization with which I have been associated for more than 10 years and on whose board I now sit.
I met with many elected officials' staff, but also had meetings with members of Congress. I have participated in an ACT "fly-in" before but, even so, I was once again exhilarated with the experience of engaging members of Congress so directly.
The participating ACT membership split up into five groups, roughly defined along geographic lines, such that each group was matched with its own members' elected officials. All in all, the ACT membership met with the offices of more than 30 Representatives and Senators, from both major parties. We carried forth important messages about cloud computing, net neutrality, intellectual property, taxation of carried interest and its impact on funding of tech startups, and more.
The good news? The ACT delegation was respectfully received, and members of both parties seem very cognizant of the importance of small technology companies to the economy. Everyone listened to us attentively, many took careful notes, and several seemed interested in working with ACT in the future, in order to understand tech issues better.
The bad news? Many, though not all, members of the Congress, including those who have significant influence over legislation affecting the industry, remain ignorant of many aspects of technology. It's a bit frightening, to be honest, and as good as the fly-in was, it certainly didn't resolve the problem.
That problem will only be solved if and when our participatory democracy enjoys, well, greater participation from the tech industry. That's a tough order because, in my experience at least, most technology entrepreneurs tend to be cynical about government, and politics too. In fact, there seems to be an intractable paradox: those who need to educate elected officials most are those least likely to believe that they can. Given how busy techies are, and their corresponding need to triage their time, political activism often gets ruled out.
Where does this leave us? I am not sure. But I would encourage people to get involved, on a trial basis, and here's why: everyone who I have seen try, including those most skeptical, become excited, engaged and much more optimistic once they've been through the process. And the next such convert could be you.
ACT maintains an office in Brussels and lobbies the European Parliament, as well as the U.S. Congress. If you're a tech entrepreneur or executive in the US or the EU, consider joining ACT and getting involved. Participate in one fly-in. If it doesn't change your outlook, so be it. But I bet it will, and I bet you can make a concrete difference in laws that affect your business, and you.
Posted by Andrew J. Brust on 06/21/2010 at 8:18 AM1 comments
I tried writing a post for this blog last night, while at the this year's
Microsoft Tech Ed and
Business Intelligence conferences in New Orleans. But I literally fell asleep while writing it. That's probably a sign that my readers might have done the same while reading it.
Why the writer's block? This was a very good show for me, but I think I was having trouble figuring out exactly why. Now that I'm on the flight home, I'm starting to piece it together.
One reason, for sure, was that I've spent years in both the developer and the BI worlds, and a show that combined the two was really enjoyable for me. Typically, the subject matter, the attendees, the Microsoft execs and managers, and even the social circles have been separate. This year's Tech Ed facilitated a fusion of each of these previously segregated groups.
That was good for me as a speaker; for example, I facilitated a Birds of a Feather session on PowerPivot (Microsoft's new self-service BI offering) that was well-attended, and by a large number of non-BI pros no less. The fusion was good for me as an attendee too, as Microsoft BI, in the form of a new Pivot Viewer control, made it into the Day 1 keynote, demoed by Microsoft's key BI champion, Amir Netz. And it was good for me socially, as I was able to meet with peers in both camps, and at one location.
Speaking of meeting with industry colleagues, I did a lot of that at this show. Probably for the first time ever, I carefully scheduled and conducted a series of meetings with friends and business acquaintances in the developer tools, data visualization, utilities, publishing and training areas of the Microsoft ecosystem. Beside the time efficiencies in conducting so many meetings, I discovered another benefit. I got a real handle on the tech industry's economic health.
The news here is good. First of all, 2010 has been a great year for just about everyone I spoke to. The mood is positive, energy is high, and people are working really hard. This is, of course, refreshing to see, and it's a huge relief. Add to that the fact that this year's Tech Ed was about 2.5 times larger in headcount than last year's (based on numbers from unofficial, but reliable, sources), and the economic prognosis seems excellent. But there's more to it than that.
Here's the thing: everyone I talked to seems to be working, and succeeding, at changing their business models to adapt to changes in the industry. Whether it's the Internet's impact on publishing and training, the increased importance of the developer audience in South Asia, the shift of affordable developer and business talent to unfamiliar locales abroad, or even lapses in Microsoft's performance in the market, partner companies aren't just rolling with the punches; they're welcoming the changes and working them to their advantage.
No one seemed downtrodden, or even fatigued. Even for businesses who have seen core revenue streams become commoditized, everyone seems to be changing their market strategy and winning. Even Microsoft, of whom I have been critical recently, showed signs of successful hard work and playbook change, in the maturing of their cloud strategy, their commitment to it and their excitement around it. And the embedded, managed, self-service BI strategy that Microsoft has been touting looks like it's already being embraced by customers, even though PowerPivot, and other new Microsoft BI products, were released only recently.
The collective optimism I have witnessed, and that I have felt, tells me good things about this industry and the economy. The stock market had huge mood swings during my stay, and that may yet subdue the industry recovery I have seen this week. Nonetheless, I am convinced that a strong foundation of hard work, innovative thinking and, if I may, true renaissance is underlying this industry's success.
That kind of strength will generate a strong recovery, I am certain, whether now or once we're past another round of choppy weather in the broader economy. The fundamentals are good.
Posted by Andrew J. Brust on 06/11/2010 at 5:25 AM2 comments
Next week marks the first full week of June. Summer will feel in full swing and it will be a pretty big season for technology. In seeming acknowledgement of that very fact, both Apple and Microsoft will be holding large developers conferences starting Monday. Apple will hold its annual
Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in lovely San Francisco and Microsoft will hold its
Tech Ed conference in muggy, oil-laden yet soulful New Orleans. A brief survey of each show reveals much about the differences in each company's offerings, strategy and approach to customers and partners.
In the interest of full disclosure, I must explain that I will be speaking at Microsoft's Tech Ed show, and have done so, on and off, since 2003. I have never been to an Apple conference and, as readers of this blog may know, I acquired my first ever Apple product two months ago when I bought an iPad on the day of that product's launch. I think I have keen insights into Microsoft's conference. My ability to comment on Apple's event ranges somewhere between backseat driver and naive observer. Just so you know.
Although both shows cater to their respective company's developers, there are a number of differences in the events' purposes and content approaches. First off, let's consider each show as a news and PR vehicle. WWDC will feature Steve Jobs' keynote address and most likely will be where Apple officially reveals details of its 4th-generation iPhone. Jobs will likely also provide deep background information on the corresponding iPhone OS release. These presumed announcements will make the show a magnet for the tech press and tech blogger elite. Apple's customers will be interested too, especially since the iPhone OS release will likely be made available to owners of existing iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad devices.
Tech Ed, on the other hand, may not be especially newsworthy at all. The keynote address will be given by Bob Muglia, who is President of the company's Server and Tools Division, and he'll likely be reviewing things more than previewing them. That's because the company has, in the last six to eight months, already released new versions of a majority of its products, including Windows, Office, SharePoint, SQL Server, Exchange, its Azure cloud platform, its .NET software development layer, its Silverlight Rich Internet Application (RIA) technology and its Visual Studio developer suite. Redmond's product pipeline has functioned more like a firehose of late, and the company has a ton of work to do to get developers up to speed on everything that's new.
I know I keep saying "developers," but in Tech Ed's case, that's not really accurate. In North America, Tech Ed caters to both developers and IT pros (i.e. technologists who work with physical IT infrastructure, as well as security and administration of the server software that runs on it). This pairing has, since its inception, struck some as anomalous and others, including many exhibitors, as very smart. Certainly, it means Tech Ed ends up being a confab for virtually all professionals in Microsoft's ecosystem. And this year, Microsoft's Business Intelligence (BI) conference will be co-located with Tech Ed, further enhancing that fusion effect.
Clearly then, Microsoft's show will focus on education, as its name assures us. Apple's will serve as both a press event and an opportunity to get its own App Store developer channel synced up with its newest technology advances. For example, we already know that iPhone OS 4.0 will provide for a limited multitasking capability; that will only work well if people know how to code to it in a capable way. Apple also told us its iAd advertising platform will be part of the new OS, and Steve Jobs insists that's to provide a revenue opportunity for developers. This too, then, needs to be explicated and soaked up buy the faithful.
A look at each show's breakout session lineup provides some interesting takeaways. WWDC will have very few Mac-specific sessions on offer, and virtually no sessions that are related to either IT or the enterprise. It's all about the phone, music players and tablets. However, WWDC will have plenty of low-level, hardcore tech coverage of such things as Advanced Memory Analysis and Creating Secure Applications, as well as lots of rich media-related content like Core Animation and Game Design and Development. Beyond Apple's proprietary platform, WWDC will also feature an array of sessions on HTML 5 and other Web standards. In all, WWDC offers over 100 technical sessions and hands-on labs.
What about Tech Ed's editorial content? Like the target audience, it really runs the gamut. The show has 21 tracks (versus WWDC's five) and more than 745 "learning opportunities," which include breakout sessions, demo stations, hands-on labs and Birds of a Feather discussion sessions. Topics range from architecture talks like Patterns of Parallel Programming, to cloud computing talks like Building High Capacity Compute Applications with Windows Azure, to IT-focused topics like Virtualization of Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Farm Architecture. I also count 19 sessions on Windows Phone 7. Unfortunately, with regard to Web standards and HTML 5, only a few sessions are offered, all of them specific to Internet Explorer.
All-in-all, Apple's show looks more exciting and "sexier" than Tech Ed. Microsoft's show seems a lot more enterprise-focused than WWDC. This is, of course, well in sync with each company's approach and products. Microsoft's content is much wider ranging and bests WWDC in sheer volume of sessions and labs. I suppose some might argue that less is more; others that Apple's consumer-focused offerings simply don't provide for the same depth of coverage to a business audience. Microsoft has a serious focus on the cloud and a paucity of coverage on client-side Web standards; Apple has virtually no cloud offering at all. Again, this reflects each tech titan's go-to-market strategy.
My own take is that employees of each company should attend the other's event. The amount of mutual exclusivity in content may make sense in terms of corporate philosophy, but the reality is that each company could stand to diversify into the other's territory, at least somewhat.
My own talk at Tech Ed will focus on competitive analysis around Microsoft's BI products. Apple does not today figure into that analysis. Maybe one day it will.
Posted by Andrew J. Brust on 06/03/2010 at 9:51 AM0 comments
Last year, I wrote Steve Ballmer an email, and he was kind enough to write me back. The email contained a scan of a
column I wrote praising Microsoft's BI strategy. His reply contained three simple words: "Super nice thanks." Well, now I'd like to write to Steve again, in an open letter format, and this time the love may be a bit tougher. But I'm still super earnest.
The past two days have been eventful ones for Microsoft: The company announced the departure of company veterans Robbie Bach and J Allard and the market announced Apple is now besting Microsoft in market capitalization. Plus, announcements were made that make it plain that Ballmer will, in effect, be running Microsoft's Entertainment & Devices division himself. With that in mind, I'd like to offer my list of a dozen things I think Microsoft's CEO should do to improve that division's offerings and, hopefully, its bottom line.
So here goes:
1. On Windows Phone 7, Stay the Course
The press is teeming with headlines and reader comments proclaiming the death-before-arrival of Windows Phone 7. That's plain silly. You've got the makings of a great and unique SmartPhone platform, and you're the only company (even considering RIM) that can offer full fidelity Exchange integration, not to mention implementing Office on the device. Let the existing team finish this puppy and ship it. And then have them pump out a few updates, over-the-air, quickly. Show them that Google Android's not the only product that can do good, rapid dot releases.
And another thing: make sure your OEMs' devices have flawless touch screens. If they don't, then you shouldn't certify them for delivery to customers. Period.
Oh, and kill the Kin, quietly. It was DOA, and you know it.
2. Move Media Center to the Xbox Platform
Media Center is, at its core, a good product. But delivering a media distribution and DVR platform on a sophisticated PC operating system like Windows 7 just creates too many moving parts. Xbox already functions as the best Media Center extender device -- it should actually be the hub as well. Media Center is mostly based on .NET code, and XNA is a .NET environment for Xbox. Find a way to bridge that small gap and make Media Center a joy to work with instead of a frustration. Beating Apple TV out of this sub-market is the lowest hanging fruit on the tree (goofy pun, but it's true).
3. Integrate Media Center with Mediaroom, or Kill the Latter
You have two media products with almost identical names. One is for standalone DVRs and the other is for IPTV cable set tops with DVR capabilities. Can we merge these please? My previous request of putting Media Center on Xbox would seem to tie into this nicely, since you've announced plans to do that with Mediaroom already.
4. Fix the Red Ring of Death
People love the Xbox, but they really don't love sending their consoles back every 18-24 months, when they get a bunch of red lights flashing on power up. You've handled this defect about as gracefully as possible, but it's been around for a long time now and it doesn't seem to be fixed yet. You can do better. In fact, you must do better, or you insult your customers.
5. Add Blu Ray to Xbox
I know, streaming movies are the future; physical media is legacy technology. So if that's true, why did you back HD DVD so hard? You know why: for now, the film studios won't allow a large selection of new release, HD, surround sound content to be distributed on any medium other than Blu Ray or cable pay per view/on-demand. Don't you want home theater buffs to see the Xbox as a fantastic device for their rigs? Don't you want to put PlayStation 3 out of its misery?
And if you follow my suggestions above (move Media Center to the Xbox and fix the Red Ring problem), you'd have it all sewn up. Do I think Blu Ray functionality will move a lot of units? No. Do I think that it would move more units with desperately-needed, influential home theater consumers? You bet. And you might sell more ZunePass subscriptions in the process.
But while you're at it, make the fan quieter, please.
6. Make More of Windows Home Server
Home Server is a fantastic product. And for reasons unknown to me, it seems like you're letting it languish. Development of the add-in ecosystem seems underfunded. WHS' unparalleled ease of use and reliability for home PC backup (and emergency restores) goes unsung. Product cycles are slow. Support for your OEMs, who are doing great work, especially in the green space with Atom CPUs, seems lacking. You've married a trophy girl and you keep her cloistered at home! That's cruel, unusual and, um, incredibly ill-advised.
Make use of this ace card, and while you're at it, give it real integration with Media Center. The integration thus far is proof-of-concept quality. You should go way past that -- both products will benefit immeasurably.
7. Set Up a Partner Platform for Custom Installers
There's a whole sub-industry of companies that install, integrate and configure home theater, security and connected home products. They have an industry group. They are influential in the high-end of the consumer electronics industry, and so are their customers. They love Media Center and they love Windows Home Server. But I have talked to several of them at the Consumer Electronics Show and they tell me you don't love them. They find it very difficult to do business with Microsoft, even though they want nothing more than to sell and evangelize your platform.
This is a travesty. Please fix it. Get Allison Watson and the Microsoft Partner Network on board and have her hire someone who knows how to run a channel program for consumer electronics companies. Problem solved. Markets expanded.
8. Make Your Own Hardware
In other areas, I know you love your partners. I help run one, so I appreciate that. But when it came to Xbox and Zune you built them yourself (albeit on a contract basis, which is fine). Windows Phone 7 has a chance to work as an OEM play, but it would work better if you produced the devices. At least consider building a reference device that sells alongside your OEMs' offerings.
That's what Google did with the Nexxus One. And while that phone was not itself a big seller, it catalyzed two wonderful things: (1) a quality bar was set and (2) partners exceeded it. Before the Nexxus One, the best Android handset out there was the Motorola Droid. The Nexxus One was better, and the HTC Droid Incredible and Evo 4G are now even better than Google's phone, which is why Verizon and Sprint decided not to carry it. Imagine if all Windows Phone 6.x devices were on par with the HTC HD2. I tend to believe you'd have a lot bigger market share than you do now.
9. Continue with Your Retail Initiative
From what I hear, it sounds like it's going well. And this goes right along with making your own hardware. When
you build it, they will come. And then it makes the likes of Best Buy and Staples do better.
10. Make an Acquisition (or Two)
TiVo and/or Moxi look ripe for the picking. With their ability to build stuff people love and your ability to run a business, you might just have something. But do a better job than you did when you bought Danger. Buy the ideas, not just the customers, eh?
11. Make Beautiful Stuff
You've heard this one before, I know. But I have some head-shrinking advice on this one. You know that Apple obsesses over its industrial design. You know that appeals to consumers. But it seems you think doing so is Apple's game exclusively and so you shouldn't even try. Bull dinky. Come to New York and visit the Museum of Modern Art's Architecture and Design gallery. You'll see that lots of companies and product categories have had very high design value well before Apple existed.
You can do this, and the Zune HD was a great start. Now run with that. Find those negative voices in your head that are telling you that you can't, and shut them up. For good.
12. Burst the Bubble
Some of the products you've built seem like they were conceived in a bizarro world. That would appear to be the result of groupthink. You must do better. And there's lots of people willing to advise you. This includes just about everyone in the Regional Director program, and probably a bunch of MVPs. Heck, I bet the guys at Engadget could help out too. Imagine if you let them see the Kin before it shipped. Talk to high-end gear consumers. Talk to Best Buy and Costco customers too.
Signing Off
I hope this advice was of value to you. As I wrote this I kept telling myself how obvious, and even trite, some of these pieces of advice were. And because of that, I doubted that they'd really help. But I decided that some of this advice must not be obvious to Microsoft. Sometimes when you get wrapped up in stuff, it's hard to clear your head. I think my head's pretty clear here though (I'm wrapped up in other stuff), so maybe my perspective can help. If not, well, then, I guess all my commentary on Microsoft can't be super nice.
Posted by Andrew J. Brust on 05/27/2010 at 6:16 AM1 comments
The competition between the Web and proprietary rich platforms, including Windows, Mac OS, iPhone/iPad, Adobe Flash/AIR and Microsoft Silverlight, is not new. But with the emergence of HTML 5 and imminent support for it in the next release of the major Web browsers, the battle is heating up. And with the announcements made Wednesday at Google's I/O conference, it's getting kicked up yet another notch.
The impact of this platform battle on companies in the media and advertising world, and the developers who serve them, is significant. The most prominent question is whether video and rich media online will shift towards pure HTML and away from plug-ins like Flash and Silverlight. In fact, certain features in HTML 5 make it suitable for development for line of business applications as well, further threatening those plug-in technologies.
So what's the deal? Is this real or hype? To answer that question, I've done my own research into HTML 5's features and talked to several media-focused, New York-area developers to get their opinions. I present my findings to you in this post.
Getting the Picture
Before bearing down into HTML 5 specifics and practitioners' quotes, let's set the context. To understand what HTML 5 can do, take a look at this YouTube video of Sports Illustrated's HTML 5 prototype. This should start to get you bought into the idea that HTML 5 could be a game-changer.
Next, if you happen to have installed the beta version of Google's Chrome 5 browser, take a look at the following page link, and in that page click on any of the game thumbnails to see what's possible, without a plug-in, in this brave new world. (Note, although the instructions for each game tell you to press the A key to start, press the Z key instead.). Here's the link: http://www.kesiev.com/akihabara
As an adjunct to what's enabled by HTML 5, consider the various transforms that are part of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) 3. If you're running Safari as your browser, the following link will showcase this live; if not, you'll see a bitmap that will give you an idea of what's possible: http://webkit.org/blog/386/3d-transforms
Are you starting to get the picture (literally)? What has up until now required browser plug-ins and other patches to HTML, most typically Flash, will soon be renderable, natively, in all major browsers. Moreover, it's looking likely that developers will be able to deliver such content and experiences in these browsers using one base of markup and script code (using straight JavaScript and/or jQuery), without resorting to browser-specific code and workarounds. If you're skeptical of this, I wouldn't blame you, especially with respect to Microsoft's Internet Explorer. However, i can tell you with confidence that even Microsoft is dedicated to full-on HTML 5 support in version 9 of that browser, which is currently under development.
So what's new in HTML 5, specifically, that makes sites like this possible? The specification documents go into deep detail, and there's no sense in rehashing them here, but a summary is probably in order. Here is a non-authoritative, but useful, list of the major new feature areas in HTML 5.
* 2D drawing capabilities and 3D transforms: 2D drawing instructions can be embedded statically into a Web page; application interactivity and animation can be achieved through script. As mentioned above, 3D transforms are technically part of version 3 of the CSS spec, rather than HTML 5, but they can nonetheless be thought of as part of the bundle. They allow for rendering of 3D images and animations that, together with 2D drawing, make HTML-based games much more feasible than they are presently, as the links above demonstrate.
* Embedded audio and video: A media player can appear directly in a rendered Web page, using HTML markup and no plug-ins. Alternatively, player controls can be hidden and the content can play automatically.
* Major enhancements to form-based input: This includes such things as specification of required fields, embedding of text "hints" into a control, limiting valid input on a field to dates, email addresses or a list of values. There's more to this, but the gist is that line-of-business applications, with complicated input and data validation, are supported directly
* Offline caching, local storage and client-side SQL database: These facilities allow Web applications to function more like native apps, even if no Internet connection is available.
* User-defined data: Data (or metadata -- data about data) can easily be embedded statically and/or retrieved and updated with Javascript code. This avoids having to embed that data in a separate file, or within script code.
Taken together, these features position HTML to compete with, and perhaps overtake, Adobe's Flash/AIR (and Microsoft's Silverlight) as a viable Web platform for media, RIAs (rich internet applications -- apps that function more like desktop software than Web sites) and interactive Web content, including games.
Judging the Impact
What do players in the media world think about this? From the embedded video above, we know what Sports Illustrated (and, therefore, Time Warner) thinks. Hulu, the major Internet site for broadcast TV content, is on record as saying HTML5 video does not pass muster with them, at least not yet. YouTube, on the other hand, already has an experimental HTML 5-based version of their site. TechCrunch has reported that NetFlix is flirting with HTML 5, too, especially as it pertains to embedded browsers in TV-based devices. And the New York Times' Web site now embeds some video clips without resorting to Flash. They have to -- otherwise iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad users couldn't see them in the Mobile Safari browser.
Speaking of the iPad, MIchael Scafidi, Razorfish technology director and presentation layer technology practice lead, in the firm's New York City office, believes it to be a catalyst for HTML 5 adoption. When I asked him whether he thought Flash would lose share to the new open Web standard, he said, "For advertising on the iPad, yes, specifically due to the lack of support of Flash on the iPad." On the current state of the art in Web browsers, Scafidi commented, "IE 8 will not support HTML 5 in banners, so an alternative will need to be used until IE9. Outside of the iPad and iPhone, Flash will still be used for more immersive media and advertising."
What do other media-focused developers think about all this? I talked to several to get their opinions. Michael Pinto is CEO and founder of Very Memorable Design, whose primary focus has been to help marketing directors get traction online. The firm's client roster includes the likes of Time, Inc., Scholastic and PBS. He predicts that companies will stick with Flash where it makes sense.
"More and more microsites that were done entirely in Flash will be done more and more using jQuery," Pinto said. "I can also see slideshows and video now being done without Flash. However, if you needed to create a game or highly interactive activity, Flash would still be the way to go for the Web."
A dissenting view comes from Jesse Erlbaum, CEO of The Erlbaum Group, LLC, which serves numerous clients in the magazine publishing sector. When I asked Erlbaum whether he thought HTML 5 and jQuery/JavaScript would steal significant market share from Flash, he responded, "Not at all! In particular, not for media and advertising customers! These sectors are not generally in the business of making highly functional applications, which is the one place where HTML5, jQuery, etc. really shines."
Ironically, Pinto's firm is a heavy user of Flash for its projects and Erlbaum's firm develops atop the "LAMP" (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Perl) stack. For whatever reason, each firm seems to see the other's toolset as a more viable choice. But both agree that the developer tool story around HTML 5 is deficient.
Pinto explains: "What's lost with [HTML 5 and Javascript] techniques is that there isn't a single widely favored easy-to-use tool of choice for authoring. So with Flash you can get up and running right away and not worry about what is different from one browser to the next."
Erlbaum agrees. "HTML5/Javascript lacks a sophisticated integrated development environment (IDE) which is an essential part of Flash. If what someone is trying to make is primarily animation, it's a waste of time... to do this in Javascript," he said. "It can be done much more easily in Flash, and with greater cross-browser compatibility and consistency due to the ubiquity of Flash."
Philosophizing on Flash
Adobe (maker of Flash since its 2005 acquisition of Macromedia) likely agrees. And for better or worse, they've decided to address this shortcoming of HTML 5, even at risk of diminishing their Flash platform. Yesterday Adobe announced that their hugely popular Deamweaver Web design authoring tool would directly support HTML 5 and CSS 3 development. In fact, the Adobe Dreamweaver CS5 HTML5 Pack is downloadable now from Adobe Labs.
Maybe Adobe is bowing to pressure from ardent Web professionals like Scott Kellum, lead designer at Channel V Media, a digital and offline branding firm, serving the media and marketing sectors, among others. Kellum told me that HTML 5 "will definitely move people away from Flash."
"It has many of the same functionalities with faster load times and better accessibility. HTML5 will help Flash as well: with the new caching methods you can now even run Flash apps offline," Kellum said.
Razorfish's Scafidi, on the other hand, believes "on the platforms that support both [Flash and HTML 5], it will be the best technology that meets the business needs that will prevail."
Although all three Web developers I interviewed would agree that Flash is still required for more sophisticated applications, Kellum seems to have put his finger on why HTML 5 may nonetheless dominate. In his view, much of the Web development out there has little need for high-end capabilities.
"Most people want to add a little punch to a navigation bar or some video, and now you can get the biggest bang for your buck with HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript," Kellum said.
I've already mentioned that Google's ongoing I/O conference, at the Moscone West center in San Francisco, is driving the HTML 5 news cycle, big time. And Google made many announcements of their own, including the open sourcing of their VP8 video codec, new enterprise-oriented capabilities for its App Engine cloud offering, and the creation of the Chrome Web Store, which the company says will make it easier to find and "install" Web applications, in a fashion similar to the way users procure native apps on various mobile platforms.
HTML 5 looks to be disruptive, especially to the media world. And even if the technology ends up disappointing, the chatter around it alone is causing big changes in the technology world. If the richness it promises delivers, then magazine publishers and non-text digital advertisers may indeed have a platform for creating compelling content that loads quickly, is standards-based and will render identically in (the newest versions of) all major Web browsers.
Can this development in the digital arena save the titans of the print world? I can't predict, but it's going to be fun to watch, and the competitive innovation from all players in both industries will likely be immense.
Posted by Andrew J. Brust on 05/20/2010 at 12:25 PM0 comments
If you're left scratching your head over SAP's intention to acquire Sybase for almost $6 billion, you're not alone. Despite Sybase's 1990s reign as the supreme database standard in certain sectors (including Wall Street), the company's flagship product has certainly fallen from grace. Why would SAP pay a greater than 50 percent premium over the Sybase closing price on the day of the announcement, just to acquire a relational database that is firmly stuck in maintenance mode?
Well there's more to Sybase than the relational database product. Take, for example, its mobile application platform. Sybase hit Gartner's "Leaders' Quadrant" in January of last year, and SAP needs a good mobile play. Beyond the platform itself, Sybase has a slew of mobile services; click this link to look them over.
There's a second major asset that Sybase has, though, and I wonder if it figured prominently into SAP's bid: Sybase IQ. Sybase IQ is a columnar database. Columnar databases place values from a given database column contiguously, unlike conventional relational databases, which store all of a row's data in close proximity.
Storing column values together works well in aggregation reporting scenarios, because the figures to be aggregated can be scanned in one efficient step. It also makes for high rates of compression because values from a single column tend to be close to each other in magnitude and may contain long sequences of repeating values. Highly compressible databases use much less disk storage and can be largely or wholly loaded into memory, resulting in lighting-fast query performance. For an ERP company like SAP, with its own legacy BI platform (
SAP BW) and the entire range of Business Objects and Crystal Reports BI products (which it acquired in 2007), query performance is extremely important.
And it's a competitive necessity too. QlikTech has built an entire company on a columnar, in-memory BI product (QlikView). So too has startup company Vertica Vertica. IBM's TM1 has been doing in-memory OLAP for years. And guess who else has the in-memory religion? Microsoft does, in the form of its new PowerPivot product. I expect the technology in PowerPivot to become strategic to the full-blown SQL Server Analysis Services product and the entire Microsoft BI stack.
I sure don't blame SAP for jumping on the in-memory bandwagon, if indeed the Sybase acquisition is, at least in part, motivated by that. It will be interesting to watch and see what SAP does with the Sybase product line-up (assuming the acquisition closes), including the core database, the mobile platform, IQ, and even tools like PowerBuilder. It is also fascinating to watch columnar's encroachment on relational. Perhaps this acquisition will be columnar's tipping point and people will no longer see it as a fad. Are you listening Larry Ellison?
Posted by Andrew J. Brust on 05/18/2010 at 6:53 AM0 comments
Yesterday, Microsoft held its flagship launch event for Office 2010 in Manhattan. Today, the Redmond software company is holding a local launch event for Visual Studio (VS) 2010, in Brooklyn. How come information workers get the 212 treatment and developers are relegated to 718? Well, here's the thing: the Brooklyn Marriott is actually a great place for an event, but you need some intimate knowledge of New York City to know that. NBC's Studio 8H, where the Office launch was held yesterday (and from where SNL is broadcast) is a pretty small venue, but you'd need some inside knowledge to recognize that. Likewise, while Office 2010 is a product whose value is apparent, appreciating VS 2010's value takes a bit more savvy.
Setting aside its year-based designation, this release of VS, counting the old Visual Basic releases, is the 10th version of the product. How can a developer audience get excited about an integrated development environment when it reaches double-digit version numbers? Well, it can be tough. Luckily, Microsoft sent Jay Schmelzer, a Group Program Manager from the Visual Studio team in Redmond, to come tell the Brooklyn audience why they should be excited.
Turns out there's a lot of reasons. Support for SharePoint development is a big one. In previous versions of VS, that support has been anemic, at best. Shortage of SharePoint developers is a huge issue in the industry, and this should help. There's also built in support for Windows Azure (Microsoft's cloud platform) and, through a download, support for the forthcoming Windows Phone 7 platform. ASP.NET MVC, a "close-to-the-metal" Web development option that does away with the Web Forms abstraction layer, has a first-class presence in VS. So too does jQuery, the open source environment that makes JavaScript development a breeze. The jQuery support is so good that Microsoft now contributes to the jQuery project and offers IntelliSense support for it in the code editor.
Speaking of the VS code editor, it now supports multi-monitor setups, zoom-in and block selection. If you're not a developer, this may sound confusing and minute. I'll just say that for people who are developers, these are little things that really contribute to productivity, and that translates into lower development costs.
The really cool demo, though, was around Visual Studio 2010's new debugging features. This stuff is hard to showcase, but I believe it's truly breakthrough technology: imagine being able to step backwards in time to see what might have caused a bug. Cool? Now imagine being able to do that, even if you weren't the tester and weren't present while the testing was being done. Then imagine being able to see a video screen capture of what the tester was doing with your app when the bug occurred. VS 2010 allows all that. This could be the demise of the IWOMM ("it works on my machine") syndrome.
After the keynote, I asked Schmelzer if any of Microsoft's competitors have debugging tools that come close to VS 2010's. His answer was an earnest, "We don't think so." If that's true, that's a big deal, and a huge advantage for developer teams that adopt it. It will make software development much cheaper and more efficient. Kind of like holding a launch event at the Brooklyn Marriott instead of 30 Rock in Manhattan!
VS 2010 (version 10) and Office 2010 (version 14) aren't the only new product versions Microsoft is releasing right now. There's also SQL Server 2008 R2 (version 10.5), Exchange 2010 (version 8, I believe), SharePoint 2010 (version 4) and, of course, Windows 7. With so many new versions at such levels of maturity, I think it's fair to say Microsoft has reached middle-age. How does a company stave off a potential mid-life crisis, especially with young Turks like Google coming along and competing so fiercely? Hard to say. But if focusing on core value, including value that's hard to play into a sexy demo, is part of the answer, then Microsoft's doing OK. And if some new tricks, like Windows Phone 7, can gain some traction, that might round things out nicely.
Are the legacy products old tricks, or are they revised classics? I honestly don't know, because it's the market's prerogative to pass that judgment. I can say this, though: based on today's show, I think Microsoft's been doing its homework.
Posted by Andrew J. Brust on 05/13/2010 at 10:34 AM0 comments